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So how exactly is WINE being emulated on an ARM platform?
Are they making QEMU integration official or are they using something different?

Yeah, Michael completely left out the most important part.

Is WINE suddenly going to be an emulator so it can run x86 code on ARM? Are they just porting winelib, so that windows developers can recompile their code for WINE on ARM? Is it just meant for Win8 ARM apps?

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There could have been two levels of emulation going on during the demo... emulating an ARM CPU on the x86 in the laptop to support the Android dev kit, then emulating x86 on the emulated ARM to run x86 Windows apps.

That would have been pretty cool, but really slow.

I guess the other likely scenario was x86 Windows app over x86 WINE over x86 Android over x86 Linux, where the most likely "emulation" was Android running in a virtual machine over a Linux host with software rendering instead of hardware accelerated graphics.

Is WINE suddenly going to be an emulator so it can run x86 code on ARM? Are they just porting winelib, so that windows developers can recompile their code for WINE on ARM? Is it just meant for Win8 ARM apps?

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It might be useless to end users in its current state, but it's probably a pretty important stepping stone to a lot of stuff that will be interesting to end users.

Way back when, we cheered for those useless builds of Mozilla, even though they crashed all the time, because we knew that they were harbingers of a better future.

+1

We don't know what Windows on ARM will hold in the future, better to get a head start. Who knows, since windows RT is so young and ARM is much simpler than x86, this could end up being a 90% successful project, unlike x86 wine which is more like 60% successful.

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A Windows application running on Android. While Wine is coming to ARM and there's quite a lot of interest there, CodeWeavers is quite interested and hopeful for the success of Intel x86 Atom CPUs for tablets. If Android gains traction on x86-based tablets and other mobile devices, CodeWeavers has a lot of commercial opportunities for pushing the running of Windows software on Android. Of course, there's ARM devices too, the Wine ARM update will be shared in another Phoronix article.

Most of you miss the point, that there will be quite alot x86-android devices. Tablets AND Phones. Google Lenovo-k900 for example.
Intel did their homework. New Atom generation is AS or even MORE efficient than current arm CPUs. And that's for the 32nm Atom. Don't forget about the 22nm tri-gate atoms coming up.

The claim that x86 ISA suffers an inherent efficiency disadvantage to ARM does not hold true when you break down the power consumption of currently-available platforms sporting both architectures. They finish neck and neck in most cases. And, when it comes to Microsoft's Surface compared to Acer's W510, the Atom-powered tablet consistently edges out Nvidia's Tegra 3.

So no need for qemu on those devices. All you have to emulate is the environment wine needs. Android doesnt use x-sever while wine heavily relies on it f.e. If there won't be a good wine port i'll just wait for someone to port a full linux-distr (including x) for those devices.